Yale Professor and King-of-the-Literary-Canon Harold Bloom in the LA Times about Stephen King:

The decision to give the National Book Foundation's annual award for "distinguished contribution" to Stephen King is extraordinary, another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life. I've described King in the past as a writer of penny dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too kind. He shares nothing with Edgar Allan Poe. What he is is an immensely inadequate writer, on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis. The publishing industry has stooped terribly low to bestow on King a lifetime award ...

Well, Harold Bloom is a twerp. Steve King's best work -- Misery, for example, or The Body, or the Man in Black short story about the kid who met the Devil, picking a few just off the top of my head -- are as good, sentence by sentence and story by story, as anything out there, by anyone.

So what's all this then? Yale cobweb Harold Bloom has been harping on about the Canon for so long he still doesn't seem to have noticed the world has moved on and left him behind. And Stephen King: sure, he writes the occassional stinker, but take the four novellas in his amazing Different Seasons collection and you'll be reading stories and meeting characters that can give any other 'literature' a run for its money. The Canon is dead, and Stephen King deserves a little recognition for his many fine books, and we can excuse those which, well, were probably written very, very fast! ;) And Harold Bloom, please, if you hate popular culture so much, stop writing about it!

0 Comments:

Links to this post:

PLEASE NOTE ...

After almost four years of constant blogging, the last post to Ponderance (this blog) was made on March 11, 2007. These archives will remain live indefinitely (or until Google starts deleting inactive blogs), but please update your links and come and visit my new blog at Tama Leaver dot Net.

Tama Leaver

I teach in the Department on Internet Studies at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Western Australia. I blog, I teach, I research, I tweet, and a few other things, too ...

Everything you want to know about me (and that I want to share) can be found at tamaleaver.net.